Saturday, June 28, 2014

Creating Solar Systems

One challenge faced in making the game is the creation of solar systems. If the idea was for the game to have a dozen static stars, then you can craft each solar system and put effort into how things are structured. But in a game with hundreds of thousands of stars, creating a random engine to generate solar systems is required.

So today I offer a screen capture of just the field created in an application used to prove a concept before I commit the application to actually generating solar systems for each of the 3000 test stars.



In the game the circles won't exist. They are just to prove that the math is working properly. Basically each planet exists within it's own orbit boundary. Keeping the game simple, all orbits are perfect circles.

The red circle indicates the beginning of an asteroid belt. There are additional factors in place to determine the density of the asteroid population. In the game asteroids will provide significant income for those that pursue mining as a career. The dots are not asteroids, but clusters. In the game, the main map when zoomed out would appear similar to the above. But when you are zoomed in and flying around an asteroid belt you would see significantly more dots on the radar. Just be sure you've equipped a good set of deflection shields on your ship, asteroids can take a serious chunk out of a space ship if you attempt to navigate without the proper equipment.

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